Sunday, March 9, 2014

Reminds Me of a Joke About Economists...

Take the name of a classical Greek mathematician and re-arrange the letters in his name to spell two numbers. What are they?

To state the puzzle in another way: Take the names of two numbers, put
them together, and find an anagram of the result that names a classical
Greek mathematician. Who is the mathematician and what are the numbers?

I've set Ross onto this while I write the blog. That's teamwork, right? [Edited to add: Solved.]

The joke: You can lay the world's economists end to end around the Equator and they still won't reach a conclusion. (Translation from the original Greek: Math is easier.)

And when you get the answer, send it in here to NPR's Contact Us page, which does not anagram to anything interesting.

Photo section is clueless today. Frankly, I had my work cut out just finding Greek statues with no naughty bits. I had no hope of finding any Greek mathematicians among Flickr's statuary. Oh, and if you have a pair of 3-D glasses left over from last's week's GRAVITY puzzle, try them on Photo #2!

Time for

This is where we ask you how many entries you think NPR will get for the
challenge above. If you want to win, leave a comment with your guess
for the range of entries NPR will receive. First come first served, so
read existing comments before you guess. Or skip the comments and send
an email with your pick to Magdalen (at) Crosswordman (dot) com. Ross
and I guess last, just before we publish the Thursday post. After the
Thursday post is up, the entries are closed. The winner gets a puzzle
book of our choosing or a contribution in the winner's honor to the Red Cross.

This week, the NPR Intern gladdened my heart by specifying "over 240." No one won, which may gladden Ross's heart as he's too busy working on our taxes to be charitable. By the way, when picking this week's range, you may take into consideration the fact that Ross hasn't solved it yet. He says, therefore, that it's hard. YMMV.

Our tie-break rule: In the event
that a single round number is announced with a qualifier such as
"about" or "around" (e.g., "We received around 1,200 entries."), the
prize will be
awarded to the
entrant who picked the range including that precise
number, e.g., 551 - 600 wins if the announced range is "around 600." We
retain the discretion to award the prize to an entrant who picked the
adjacent range (e.g., 601-650) if that entrant had not
already won
a prize. In the event that
both entrants had won a
prize already or neither had,
then to the earlier of the
two entries on the
famous judicial principle of
"First Come First Serve,"
(or in technical legal jargon,
"You Snooze, You Lose").
As of January, 2014, this rule is officially even more complicated than
it's ever been, but at least it's consistent with what we actually do..

Phil: Nope. The longer of the number names I have is without taint, not so the shorter.It doesn't pay to expect rigor from Dr. S. I suspect at least one of his "numbers" will be a name for a grouping, not a number.

I submitted a solution on Sunday that in consistent withMendo Jim's comment. If you look at the problems thatThe NYT reports from the Momath event that Will ran in 2012, you can get an idea of the variety and complexity of the problems he poses . This in turn is a clue aboutwhat kinds of mathematical constructs WS includes inhis definition of a number. Then some of the shorter "first" names on the list of Greek mathematicians provide a possible answer.